TAX AND TORMENT

This is a rant written during the final stages of preparing my tax 
return. Yes I'm still working on that and it's due at the end of 
the week - the usual situation, only it's taken even longer than 
usual this time. Not least thanks to the website refusing to let me 
log in (providing an wide range of error messages as excuses not 
to) until I eventually tried with an OLD version of Firefox 
(pre-Quantum), out of pure desperation, and it worked.

The profanity forecast is heavy for the start of the text, but 
easing throughout the rant.


So I'm waiting for the stupid site to load on my old laptop instead 
because that's got an old enough browser to work with their stupid 
fucking multimillion dollar website.

Would you believe it doesn't save what you fill in automatically?! 
All of this fucking scripting that breaks it in modern Firefox and 
they didn't even put in a fucking auto-save! Yeah, my browser 
crashed. No it doesn't often, but yes when I'm filling in a long 
multi-page tax form... that doesn't have auto-save!

All this shit just to tell them that I make no fucking money. Yes 
fucking government I wasted a whole financial year working 
desperately to earn what you fucking public servants probably spend 
on your fucking iPhones. Now I'm wasting a week just to prove to 
you fucking dick heads that I really am a complete fucking failure. 
that after over half a decade of pushing to get somewhere I've got 
absolutely nowhere.

Perhaps if I worked in some cafe you'd be giving me money because 
I'm disadvantaged for being in lockdown for almost half of the 
time? Instead I just had all of my international sales disappear 
due to the services getting suspended, and had to d to refund no 
end of people whose orders got sent in March and didn't arrive for 
months - so I'm not only out of pocket on the item but also the 
extra-expensive cost of sending the items in the first place. But 
no I'm not getting anything, except the tax you already witheld on 
my share dividends, and that's not worth all of this effort on its 
own anyway. But all I really want is to be fucking left alone - 
just fuck off with your fucking tax return!

I mean what government money do I actually take advantage of? I 
spent over $800 on international parcels the other week - to 
Australia Post - the fucking governement-owned postal monopoly 
where the damn CEO says publicly that they don't have any duty to 
the state because they're a privatised organisation, so they can 
hand out bonuses and fancy watches to their board just because this 
damn pandemic meant they made an absolute mint while everyone 
waited over a month for parcels to come from a few hundred 
kilometers away (not an exaggeration). They're where my fucking 
money's going. All of the services that I actually use were 
privatised before I was born - with companies charging a mint for 
them now, and nobody able to regulate them properly.

The fucking trains! Except for the pandemic I go into Melbourne 
once a year on the train. The fare goes up around $4 every year! 
This in a country where the economy has been almost stalled for 
years! That ain't no inflation, no more than the cost of a stamp 
going from $0.65 to $1.10 in a decade, while Aus Post make a mint 
off the online shopping boom. What it is is Vline (government-owned 
privatised rural train operators in Victoria) execs taking back 
handers for awarding cleaning contracts - revealed in an enquiry 
going on right now! I wouldn't be surprised if there's a similar 
reason for the half-arsed private security mob being used for the 
leaky hotel quarintine that cuased our second wave here. After 
police and defence personel had already been offered, they go and 
hire a securyity firm that sub-contracts a security firm, that 
sub-contracts a security firm, that advertises on these "gig 
economy" sites and ends up with people standing around playing on 
their phones between doing meal delivery work as our ownly defence 
against the virus and subsequent months of lockdown.

One thing that they do still do is the roads, looking after all of 
the pristine potholes along the road I take into town, for example. 
Making sure to fill in all of the small one, and leaving one big 
one, located in the middle of a dip in the road where you can't see 
it, that's now deep enough that you could bury a tax collector in 
it. I forgot about it when coming home late last weekend - not 
enough time to get over to the other side of the road to avoid it 
so I tried to straddle it, but it's too wide now so it caught a 
wheel and pulled the car to the right. I lost traction on the 
gravel, and painted a pretty picture of four wheel tracks swirling 
around in the dust before finally sliding off the road and turning 
into muddy wheel ruts that thankfully where able to curve back 
towards the road just alongside the fence, and somehow without 
getting bogged. At least the Jag's suspension is built like a tank, 
so no damage done, just a lot of mud to wash off. To be honest I 
still haven't got around to reporting that pothole yet, but then 
I've _seen_ road workers pass by it for pitty's sake!

OK OK, I think I've vented now. Let's submit this damn tax return. 
Though it's probably timed out or something now anyway...

 - The Free Thinker